Passing Game Calibration

Update

Still on play authoring. Offense and defense are mostly set. Special teams made a mess of it. Offensive and defensive players can be on the field at the same time, which broke an assumption I’d quietly baked in all over the place.

And every time I get into QA mode I find something that sends me a different direction. Building the shotgun package, I locked in the players for that package. Fine. Then: what if I want to swap RB1, my strength back, for RB2, the scat back, on one particular formation? Or one particular play? That’s a rewrite. “Just let owners author plays,” I said.

I’m close on owner-authored offensive plays. Close has been a couple weeks away for a couple weeks now.

The Passing Game

Then I pulled the stats.

Zero drops. Not a low number. Zero. Thousands of pass attempts and not one receiver ever put the ball on the ground. Meanwhile passes defended was in the thousands.

That’s not a bug in one function. That’s the sim telling me my model of a completion is wrong. If nearly every throw is contested and nothing is ever simply dropped, then “open” is defined so tightly that almost nobody qualifies, and every catch resolves as defended-or-caught with nothing in between. Real football has a third outcome: the guy was open, the ball was there, and he dropped it. My sim didn’t have that outcome available.

So I’m recalibrating what open means. How much separation actually counts as open. How that scales with the receiver’s stats against the defender’s. Whether a step and a half at the break is the same thing as a step and a half at the catch point. It isn’t, and right now I’m treating them the same.

That pulled the next thread: passing progression. If the QB is throwing into coverage that often, then either the reads aren’t working the way I designed them or the checkdown never looks appealing enough to take. So now I’m back inside how the QB walks his progression, and when he decides to come off a covered target instead of forcing it.

The stats screen was built for exactly this and it’s the first time it’s really paid for itself. Numbers on a page caught something I’d watched happen a hundred times and never once questioned.

Current Dev

Finish offensive play authoring. Recalibrate separation and the catch model. Then back through the progression logic in the practice game, where I can run it a hundred times in a row instead of waiting on a season to tell me.

More next time.